A Genealogy of Liberty: A Lecture by Quentin Skinner

this program is brought to you by the Stanford Humanity Center for more information please visit us at hc. stanford.edu it's my very very great honor this evening to bring you the Harry Camp Memorial lecture which is presented every other year by a distinguished scholar artist or writer this lecture fund was established in 1956 by friends and Associates of Harry Camp a prominent businessman man and philanthropist in San Francisco who was described by his friends as a gentle and wise humanitarian the fund he established over half a century ago continues to bear fruit bringing outstanding speakers

to the university for public lectures that promote the study of the concept of the dignity and the worth of the individual tonight we are delighted to welcome the eminent political theorist and historian Quenton Skinner Professor Skinner is Barbera Bowmont professor of the humanities and co-director of the center for the study of the history of political thought at Queen Mary University of London he has published extensively on the evolution of political thought in early modern Europe his interests and Publications range widely over the Rocky and deeply corrugated terrain of the period roughly 14400 to 1800 in

Europe when a host of new or revived political ideas emerged to challenge the religious literary and political formations of the Middle Ages he has written on makavelli Thomas Hobbs Shakespeare and many others he received the Wolfson history prize for the foundations of modern political thought from 1978 a landmark study that the the times literary supplement proclaimed one of the most important hundred books published since the second world war he holds dozens of honorary degrees and is the recipient of so many prizes that it would detain me at the Lector for too long to mention them

all throughout his career Professor Skinner has been a model for many including many of us in this room about how to write a history of ideas that is Thoroughly contextualized in its historical milu I have so many times returned to his 1969 article on meaning and understanding in the history of ideas for a refresher course on how to avoid some of the many traps that await the historian who attempts the perilous task of recovering a lost intellectual world before I hand the podium to him let me close by expressing the collective and effusive thanks of

the Stanford Community for Professor Skinner's extraordinary intellectual generosity during his visit here in the space of four short days he has agreed to a conversational lunch with The Graduate students in the history Department to a lecture on rhetoric and Shakespeare in the English Department to an undergraduate class to this lecture and tomorrow to a paper at the political Theory Workshop not to mention approximately 4 million lunches and coffees with colleagues we are grateful that he seems to have taken very much to heart the injunctions to selfless civic virtue of the Great Renaissance figures he has

spent a lifetime studying Professor Skinner will speak for approximately one hour there will then be a half an hour of Q&A we will have microphones going around if you have a comment please phrase it in the form of one question and please join me in welcoming Professor Quenton Skinner [Applause] well Professor Winter thank you enormously much for these deeply generous very welcoming words it is a great honor to be invited to deliver the Harry Camp lecture and the list of previous lecturers is an extremely inspiring one unless you're standing where I am in which case

it's an extremely daunting one uh as has been noted the requirement of the occasion is that the lecturer should address an issue I'm quoting concerned with the dignity and worth of the individual both in its historical development and in its present significance and that was what decided me to try to say something about the concept of Liberty which is surely the core Concept in our thinking about the dignity and worth of the individual now since in speaking of Liberty or freedom I shall use those terms interchangeably um we are undoubtedly referring to one of our

core moral and political values it would be good if I could work towards a definition of the term on which we might at least in principle be able to agree but here I am a nitian and that's of course reflected in my title um and what Nature has to say about these definitions in the genealogy of morality Concepts that have histories He suggests cannot have definitions this is a really deep point of course some Concepts have definitions but if they have a history they can't freedom is unquestionably one such concept because the meaning and the

application of the term have been contested throughout the history of the modern world so there's a big methodological question how in such a case should we proceed and I'm going to follow n's suggestion which is by genealogy trying to see how the concept evolved in our culture but also how it was contested how rival understandings of how to think about it emerged and did battle nature loves this idea that Concepts I mean wienstein tells us concepts are tools nature prefers to say no they're weapons we're doing battle here and these are all ideological conflicts so

this kind of genealogy is what I shall attempt however this is obviously a vast undertaking and I'm going to have to do something arbitrary to bring my materials under some kind of control so what I've decided to do it is arbitrary is to concentrate on the genealogy as it unfolds in the English language tradition of classical liberal political philosophy why because if I make that my focus I'm not simply tracing a descent or a series of descents I'm also pointing to a set of views that are alive in our culture here and now and which

help to supply many of us with an element of our moral and political identity okay to begin within the classical liberal tradition the earliest Treatise in which the concepts of civil and political Liberty are systematically analyzed is also as it happens one of the most important works of political philosophy in the English language and that is Thomas hobbs' Leviathan first published in 1651 chapter 21 of Hobs is laran is entitled of the liberty of subjects and that really inaugurates the modern discussion I don't think that's in dispute and that's why I'm going to start there

now a further Merit of beginning with Hobbs is that his understanding of civil liberty has turned out to be extraordinarily influential so that his analysis is also a very familiar one as this shows us at once within the classical liberal tradition the earliest treaties in which the concepts of civil and political Liberty are analyzed as I say is hobs and we're looking at the analysis and I've called this the liberal concept and as you see it's a very simple concept it just has two components it proposes that for an individual to enjoy Freedom as a

citizen of a state there must be power on the part of the individual to act in pursuit of a given option or at least alternative and there must be no interference with the exercise of That Power by any external agency so let me take these two ideas in turn first Power Hobson insists and I I think myself this is a valuable insistence that it makes no sense to talk about freedom of action except in the relation to whether you have a power to perform that action or not that's contrary to a very strong tendency in

contemporary anglophone political philosophy which is to suppose I mean I quote Jerry Cohen for example in his essay freedom and money that inability is a sufficient condition of unfreedom or amaren um makes the same claim in his great Treatise on freedom and development I quote if you are unable to perform an action you are unfree to perform it now Hobbs suggests Aon obviously but usefully that that is not a good way to think about the relationship he would want to say that if you lack the power to act in a certain way I don't know

what the power to walk on water then you're neither free to do that nor are you unfree to do that because you are simply unable to do it and if you're simply unable the question of Freedom doesn't arise you're not free but you're not unfree we're in the wrong discourse you're just unable now you can put that point the other way around and if you do so you bring out its philosophical significance which is that if you are unfree to act in some particular way that must be because you have been disempowered okay by some

identifiable agency this is the point that Fuko in his discourses of power has made important made famous in our time all talk about freedom is nested within discourses of power and that seems to me right and that's the Hoban thought Fuko of course taking it from Hobs okay I turn secondly to this idea of interference Hobs is claimed here is in effect about how to understand this idea of disempowerment you're said to be disempowered and hence unfree if and only if someone has interfered with your capacity to exercise a power so on this analysis Freedom

simply consists in absence of interference um by such external agencies so by the way I mean that explains why in current political Theory freedom is so often described as a negative concept I mean not wrongly because the suggestion that we've got here is that the presence of freedom is always marked by an absence and if you ask well what absence the answer is absence of interference that marks the presence of Liberty so there's hs's view but obviously that doesn't get us very far because if Freedom turns out to consist in absence of interference then what

what is interference I mean that's not a clear concept at all but it turns out that freedom is the blank freedom is the negative concept so what we've actually got to understand is interference that's where all the conceptual work is being done now of course Hobbs hasn't failed to notice that and he goes on to give us an account of interference and again it's an extremely straightforward one so here's hobbs' understanding of the concept of interference external agencies are said to interfere when they act on the body of an individual in such a way that

an action within the power of the individual is prevented or compelled notice always two modalities for taking away Freedom you can stop someone from acting or you can prevent them from doing anything else so limiting choices two modalities of limiting choices due to the application of physical Force by the external agency in such a way that any alternative is rendered impossible so we've arrived at hobbs' definition of freedom freedom is I quote the beginning of chapter 21 absence of external impediments to motion well there is the hobin analysis so may we just contemplate it for

a moment and as you do so you'll immediately notice one very important implication which I need to under line it's said to be only bodily interference that takes away freedom of action so the implication here is that if it is only your will that is coerced I mean if for example you only obey the law because you're frightened of the consequences of Disobedience which is the state's standard assumption about you then what hubs wants to say is that when you obey the law you are nevertheless acting freely and you are always free to disobey because

this is only coercion of the will and that does not take away Freedom so again chapter 21 of laran fear and Liberty are consistent now Hobbs really means that and um he doesn't illustrate it but one can illustrate it with an example which is extremely common in early modern philosophy John lock for example uses it and this is the example of the highway man the hman is the person who P points the gun and says your money or your life Hobs says you're being offered a choice that's what you have to recognize you're being offered

a choice you could decide to hand over your money or you could decide to hand over your life but choice is freedom and that's a choice and hob summarizes this in a nasty joke when he says that when you decide to hand over your money you not only do it willingly and therefore freely but very willingly so there's the hsian analysis of what I'm calling the liberal view of Freedom it's a version of that view and it's important for me to add because I'm doing genealogy this evening that this way of thinking remains widely endorsed

in contemporary political philosophy for example you'll find exactly this view elaborated and defended in in two of the most ambitious recent works on the theory of individual Freedom I'm thinking of Ian Carter's book with Oxford the measure of Freedom or Matthew Kramer's book also with Oxford the quality of Freedom so this genealogical um strand runs right down into our own time looking at this though you you might think look something has obviously gone wrong in the hsian analysis and I'm very happy about the laughter that there was or so ago because you know of course

we're going to say well something is a Miss with this analysis um that there is compatibility of Freedom with coercion of the will and the view that there is something a Miss with that thought was what got taken up in the next Generation after Thomas Hobbs so I now my genealogy is already on the Move I'm moving down into this next generation and in particular in the criticism to be found in the most celebrated work of political philosophy in the anglophone tradition of that next Generation namely John locks twoes two Tes of government first published

in 1689 so I now want to say a word about Lock's retort to Hobbs Lo agrees of course that you are unfree to act if you're prevented bodily from exercising a power I mean it would be remarkable to deny that you would get into the stoic paradoxes of Freedom if you denied that but Lo wants to insist that you will also be rendered unfree whenever your will is coerced here is Lo in paragraph 176 of the second treaties should a robber break into my house and with a dagger at my throat Make Me Seal documents

to convey my estate to him would that give him title well the question is purely rhetorical because what LO wants you to agree is that in such a predicament you really do not have an alternative it's really idle to say that you have an alternative so coercion of the will may not render the action impossible which of course is hobbs' condition the impossibility condition but it certainly renders it what LO calls ineligible ineligible that's to say it's not an object of choice you would never choose it so to that degree you just are not free

so the addition of Lock's critique makes the genealogy look like this we now have Thomas Hobbs over on the extreme left wing he doesn't want to be there but that's what where I've put him there is hobbs' analysis coming down the left hand side or most people within the classical Republican sorry the classical liberal tradition have wanted to say that um a bending of the will by coercion also takes away freedom of action notice however that we're now dealing with a concept that makes no appearance in hobbs' analysis as it's coming down the left hand

side here um that of coercion and indeed according to this view notice uh if you're going to understand Freedom that is one of the fundamental concepts that you've got to understand now you see how clever Hobs was because what what do we mean by coercion that's not a clear concept at all but it's suddenly been made Central to the to the liberal analysis so you would think that Lo the the the founder as it were of of the anglo-american liberal story would have something to tell us about coercion he gives no analysis of this concept

in the treaties of government it's a very surprising Omission all he does is to give us some of what he takes to be clear examples of coercion so you know the usual fatal move in analytical political philosophy he he invites you to consult your intuitions uh and you think yes that is definitely coercion and he gives four examples um threats promises offers bribes all of these he says bend the will and in that way take away your freedom but don't those examples point to the need for an analysis uh because if we were Consulting our

intuitions we would surely want to say this list is is looking a bit dubious I mean consider for example the fact that the list includes bribes is it really true that if I offer you a bribe I coers you into acting in a certain way I mean suppose a politician um who is Accused in court of having accepted a bribe assures the judge that he should not be held responsible because the sum of money involved was simply so enormous that he had no choice but to offer it couldn't he could fail to take it um

that's not going to be a legal defense oddly enough so what this shows is that the Elian account needs something that Hobs deliberately keeps free of we've got to engage with this idea of what it means for the will to be coerced that's to say what's to count as the sort and the extent of the bending of the will that we do want to say takes away freedom that's not something that lock provides and as far as I can see um yeah that that is what I want to say as far as I can see

the there's no one in the anglophone classical liberal tradition who really faces this squarely until Jeremy benam does in his great Treatise written in the 1780s called on the limits of the penal branch of legislation so the genealogy is now moving from the late 17th century down into towards the late 18th century benom proposes that we need to distinguish two different ways that in which you can bend someone's will fundamentally two two opposed ways one is that you can promise that you will reward them for compliance with your will um so I say something like

uh if you do what I want I'll give you a million dollars now if you refuse your no worse off if you accept your better off few million dollars better off contrast that benam says well he doesn't give the dollars example um contrast that with the case where I threaten you with penalties for non-compliance with my with my will so for example I say if you don't do what I say I'll kill you so in that case you either comply with my will in which case you're no better off or you don't comply with my

will in which case you're substantially worse off in fact you're dead now bentham's proposal is that coercion we can only properly speak of in the second type of case the second type of case is coercion that is threatening me with penalties for non-compliance as long benam adds as certain features of the threat itself are fulfilled and these are I think ingenious and important one is the threat must be credible um that's to say you're going to have to avoid this threat secondly the the threat must be serious that's to say it's well worth avoiding it

and thirdly it's got to be immediate so to speak you can't run away you're going to have to face it so if there is a threat which fulfills those three criteria then coercion is what we're facing now in contemporary political philosophy there's been a lot of work done on coercion and some of the classic work was done by Robert nosic especially a major essay of his called coercion and he of course uses benams analysis everyone has used bentham's analysis and he ingeniously points out that it doesn't quite work because you can think of cases where

there would be a reward which is nevertheless coercive but what I think we would have to say and which even nosic agrees with is that benam has isolated the Paradigm case of coercion and so I think we can incorporate the refinement is rendering Alternatives ineligible standardly and basically by means of threats so long as the threats are incredible immediate and serious okay is that perhaps the analysis of Freedom that you want if so this is a very short lecture um now it's worth asking that question because within the classical liberal tradition the answer that would

unhesitatingly have been given for a long time was yes that is it there that's the analysis we want of the idea of individual freedom and indeed you might reflect on the most celebrated single contribution in our time to my subject this evening namely Isaiah Berlin's famous essay two concepts of Liberty among the two concepts that he analyzes Berlin has a preferred account of Freedom so what is his preferred account you're looking at it that's his preferred account so it's entitled to our very respectful attention because notice again the genealogy has come right down to our

time however within the liberal tradition there arose a further complicating moment with the publication of what is undoubtedly the most celebrated text on my exact topic this evening namely John Stewart Mills essay cord on Liberty of 1859 one of the moves that Mill makes in that very original text is to point out that the liberal tradition thus far and he's thinking of what I've been talking about he's thinking about Hobs he's thinking about lock he's thinking about the utilitarians of course and especially benom that that tradition endorses one principle that Mill considers questionable and there

it is I'm not allowed to move because of the otherwise I would come and point but I'm no okay oh is that right I can you should have told me that I can wander about no not really but I don't want no all right no I won't want I told you didn't I okay I promise not to wonder about but it's at the middle at the top it's at the middle at the top of the chart that freedom consists in the absent of interference with the exercise of your powers by external agencies at the middle

at the top by external agencies that's to say by another person or by a group or of course important for these writers natural agencies can take away Freedom um anything that threatens to leave you powerless but what Mill asks in chapter three of the essay on Liberty is this is it true that freedom is necessarily interpersonal in this way that we're looking at or could it be the case somehow that the agent who takes away your freedom could be you it's not interpersonal that you could be the agent of the destruction of your own Freedom

well as soon as you entertain that thought the liberal tradition begins to look a lot more complicated and this complication is one of the major nodes of late 19th century social and political philosophy as people begin to ask can we make sense of this radical extension of the classical liberal tradition so here it is with the extension added no interference by external agencies or some people want to add by the self the self can prevent or compel its own actions due to the operation of what I mean how are we going to start to fill

this out that's the analytical challenge that we now face well um here we are beginning to wade into extremely deep philosophical Waters about the notion of the self and is it a divided notion in the way that this is presupposing but the writers that I'm interested in this tradition this evening are resourceful about this and have a number of answers and here is the first now here the suggestion is that the will so to speak can Ally itself either with reason or with some Passion of the Soul as would call it some I mean anger

or Envy or hatred or something that just blows you away where the resulting action is motivated not by one of those passions but by reason conquering those passions the resulting action is said to be free that's a free action so notice very strong conceptual connection being suggested here between freedom and reason where on the other hand it is Passion that has blown you away the resulting action is held to be not fully free and the writers who like to think in these terms from the 17th century onwards make a distinction here between Liberty and license

if you're acting out of passion that is not free action that is Lous action it's only if you're acting according to Freedom as your motive that you act freely now there are deep roots for that view I mean for example what I've just said um is a paraphrase of what John Lock already says in his essay concerning human understanding of 1690 Mill certainly alludes to this idea especially when he's comparing the higher and lower Pleasures when he's criticizing benam but Mill isn't so much interested in a mill is much more interested in what he takes

to be a second possible internal constraint on our freedom and it's this now Mill introduces this suggestion with the claim that as he says at the start of the essay I quote in our time he's speaking of mid Victorian England the Yoke of law has become lighter but the Yoke of opinion has become heavier I think that's right in as much as most of the protests that were offered in the name of freedom in the early modern period were offered in the name of Freedom as against the state but Mill who is here closely following

his Elder contemporary tovil is much more impressed by the power not of the state but of Civil Society within the state to limit your freedom and that that happens through demands for Conformity to Convention demands of Civil Society they're implicit demands of Civil Society for you to follow certain norms and conventions of behavior and Mill thinks that where that demand is very strong as he thought it was in 19th century Britain then the effect will be to cause you inauthentically to internalize those those social norms until you follow them in preference to your authentic desires

he's very concerned about this point I quote chapter 3 it's a beautiful epigrammatic passage of the essay on Liberty the people of England think themselves free but they choose what is customary in preference to their inclination until it does not occur to them to have any inclination except for what is customary so people this is Mill's Point are not reflecting on their choices and if you don't stand back in this Socratic way that he always asks you to do from your choices then they're not genuinely free choices because you're simply allowing the circum pressures of

your Society to dictate what you think are your choices now I've spoken of Mill as as the great spokesman for that view in the anglophone classical tradition of liberalism and I think that is correct but notice of course that that came down to our time in existentialist moral philosophy which is an enormous extension of that just that idea of how the self can enslave the self through inauthenticity let me round off this part of my discussion by adding a word about one other possibility in late 19th century social philosophy although I have to say that

this will cause me to Skid off my purely English language track just for a moment although the works I want to talk about are all translated into the English language so here is the possibility that I want to put before you the idea that you might undermine your own Freedom by acting with a Consciousness which is false false to what false to your own true or real interests maybe not false to your phenomenal desires but false to your real interests notice how close Mill comes to this when he talks about the permanent interests of men

he's talking about men always of course I'm sorry um as Progressive beings the permanent interests of men as Progressive beings but of course the classic expression in late 19th century social philosophy of this view is in KL Marx and Marx's key suggestion as of course you know is that social being determines Consciousness so if your Consciousness is determined by a society in which freedom of action is conceived of in Bourgeois terms then you will become the agent of your own servitude because you will be endorsing a Bourgeois and Marx would wish to say a false

understanding of what is in your real interests and of course I don't need to tell you that that strand of of the genealogy has also come powerfully D into our own times especially through the German tradition but habas the great exponent of the distinction between phenomenal desires and real interests in Social philosophy in our time has of course been in English language since the 1960s and so this part of the liberal story also comes down to our time that's the most important thing um I seem to be in fuk odian mood a bit this evening

Fuko famous of course for the claim that there's no such thing as an exhaustive taxonomy that must be right um and in any case I want to leave the inquiry as open as we can possibly believe it we are talking about Freedom um so I would be very happy if people had more to say um about that in discussion by the way of course the most obvious thing that's going to occur to us is the unconscious I mean FR always saw himself as a theorist of freedom and with very unfortunately sexist way of putting it

but he said the aspiration of his theory was to make people a master in their own house again that's to say well you all know the theory and it skids away from social philosophy so I haven't talked about it but there might be other candidates besides Freud's theory okay we now have I think you'd agree an array of different conceptions of freedom and it's definitely beginning to look like a genealogy in that some choices are required there are disputes here which are going to be irresolvable some people are going to say we don't want to

add the self some are going to say we have to add the self some are going to say the external inference has to be only bodily some are going to say it includes the will so there's no way of turning this into a narrative now this is the Collision that n talks about however we should notice that all of what you're looking at have one basic element in common as they explicate Freedom they all think of it as absence of interference notice interference turns out to be an incredibly complex concept there it is at the

top it's doing all the work it's all about what it means for their to be interference intrusions of various kinds they may come they may well up from you they may be circum presses of your Society they may come from the state they're all intrusions they're all interferences but towards the very end of the 19th century which is where my genealogy has now reached a number of anglophone political philosophers begin to argue that what you're looking at is radically incomplete and these are the people who are drawing on the philosophy of ha Hegel who um

had um argued as of course we all know that to think of Liberty like this as Hegel says in a wonderful passage in the philosophy of right only the English could be so crude this is freedom you haven't even started this is the negative moment of a dialectic freedom is a dialectical moment you're free from something but you're also free to do something well of course the liberal tradition is not without a response to Hegel and do you find the response at the top of the chart we want to be impeded if you ask impeded

from doing what the answer is from impeded from doing whatever you want that's the glory of the liberal tradition it doesn't block that off you could say therefore that there's always a kind of positive element in the notion of freedom because you can always ask why you want to be free from impediments I mean what is this freedom for why is it a value for you and that is that's a positive question but I do think it's a great strength of this tradition that I've so far laid out that it answers the healan question with

whatever you want although of course and Mill is famous for this within the bounds of what he calls the harm principle whatever you want provided it doesn't harm others but I know I need at this stage to know notice um a very different answer that Rose to prominence in English language political philosophy at the very end of the 19th century and according to the view of things that I now want to say a word about we want to be free not in order merely to act at will so that it's a kind of blank space

but rather in order to act in such a way and here's the hegelian thought in such a way as to realize the essence of your nature that is freedom in anglophone political philosophy the leading exponent of this view was the philosopher called th green although course Bradley bosen KET a large number of philosophers at the turn of the 19th into the 20th centuries green wrote an essay called on the different meanings of freedom and he ends by saying and I quote him to be free is to have realized that which we have it in ourselves

to become so being and becoming very important in this hegelian way of thinking about freedom and according to this view we ought therefore to characterize as free that's to say as as truly free V real Freedom as Hegel would say only those persons who as green puts it have in fact acted in such a way as to realize the essence of their nature so notice that a wide conceptual Gulf has now opened up at this point between this View and everything that we've so far looked at the hegelians do not think of Freedom as absence

of interference on any understanding interference rather they are claiming that freedom is self-realization so notice what has happened is that this tradition of thinking has helped itself to a massive additional premise which is that human nature is normative there's a normativity in human nature which this is saluting and of course that's Hegel subjection to the liberal tradition it doesn't accept the normativity of human nature now you may not think it makes sense to say that human nature is normative although we do talk like this we we say of certain things that was completely inhuman or

we say yes we do say that don't we so it's it's in our thinking that human nature might be normative and if you are willing to entertain that thought then obviously there are going to be as many different theories of Liberty as self-realization as there are coherent views about what constitutes the essence of what it is to be truly human that normative essence of human nature so we need to ask well what view about the normativity of human nature did these writers actually espouse well you could espouse many I guess but if you think think

about the Western Way of tradition of thinking about this in very general terms we've really only ever espoused two large pictures at this point one is classical and one is Christian now green is a Christian uh and he's very taken with the idea this Christian Paradox that what Freedom might be is service service to God might be freedom because it's in service to God that you realize the essence of your nature okay well there is a very strong story of course it's the one that nature is denouncing isn't it in the genealogy of morality that's

the slave morality um but that's not a political theory on the contrary that's that's sort of a rejection of politics if we're talking about a political theory of this kind then we are driven back into the classical story that the way in which we most fully realize ourselves that's to say the arena for our talents the arena for our virtues is the Civic Arena and that is not service of God but service of fellow human beings that discloses you as a free person so I'm suggesting we've inherited two principal views about this idea that Liberty

has this positive concept and one is essentially the Aristotelian View that we are the zoon politicon we are the political animal and that's what it is to be free it's to realize that that's your nature and here of course is the the superseding view that no that our our our true nature is spiritual now I again want to emphasize that this way of thinking has come right down into our own time amongst recent philosophers who have unambiguously taken up position X which of course is all I'm talking about because I'm talking about um politics this

evening the most prominent has been Hannah arent hasn't it especially in her wonderful essay called what is freedom I quoted freedom is politics now that is a wonderful remark I mean she's not saying freedom requires politics or she's saying the activity of politics is the arena in which your virtues and your talents are put to work in such a way as to make you most fully the free person that you have it in yourself to become so there is your self-realized another um healan which I mean I think this is I suppose mediated through haiger

in um Hanah aren's case but a pure healan writing in the English language in our time is Charles Taylor Charles Taylor in his great Treatise sources of the self has this distinction where he wants to say freedom is usually understood as an opportunity concept as he calls it that's to say to be free is just to have options which of course is what we're seeing all over the left hand side of this genealogy but he wants to say look that that's not how to think about freedom freedom is not um an opportunity concept it is

an exercise concept that's to say I can only tell if you are a free person once I've seen how you conduct yourself and of course I mean homoeconomicus um well maybe we can talk about that I want to pause at this juncture because I think it would be quite generally agreed and you'd have to be a quite wide minded contemporary analytical philosopher in political Theory to think that we need to incorporate so much I mean what is currently the latest and therefore in bold would be unhesitatingly crossed out by a lot of the people I've

talked about down the leftand side um but that this somewhere here we've now got the genealogy if you think that then I think you're missing an element in the genealogy which has indeed been largely successfully effaced by the ideological Triumph of Classical liberalism but which needs crucially I think to be added to the picture and my desire to add something to the picture which is not there we've left Isaiah Berlin very far behind haven't we my desire to add something to Pi which is not there is really uh my excuse for standing before you this

evening and it's with this further force that I want to end I can best begin um by suggesting um that we can see what's missing by making a point about hobbs' argument that commentators on hobbs' philosophy never seemed to point out which is that when he gives you this story which I've put all the way down the left hand side this is extremely polemical I mean it it begins a story which has become our story so we're prone not to see that this is a fiercely polemical thing that he's doing in talking about Freedom he

is trying to discredit a completely different way of thinking about freedom and look how successful it was I mean this is a story that rolls through right down into contemporary political Theory so what Hobs was objection objecting to has rather got effaced now to see the contention that Hobbs is trying to discredit I think the best thing to do is to go back to what is in fact one of the founding texts of modern Western political Theory and that is the CeX of Roman law the Codex of Roman law which has an extraordinary influence um

in all our cultures Begins by making a distinction between the figure of the free man or woman Liber homo the free man or woman and the figure of the slave now according to this view of course ex hypothesi a slave is unfree but notice that in order to understand what freedom is on this account what you crucially need to understand is what makes a slave unfree then you'll understand Freedom now it's crucial to see that the answer is nothing to do with interference I mean this was something that was very prominent in Roman comedy and

in In classical Reflections on slavery um plotus has charact I mean slave characters in plotus whose Master is either completely benign or is always away they do whatever they want this is put on the Roman stage they're not interfered with in the pursuit of their goals but they're still slaves so that's what makes those comedies so uneasy a slave who only ever did his master's bidding and did it willingly would never suffer coercion and so you'd have a deep Paradox a free slave by contrast many free citizens in Antiquity would have had extremely circumscribed lives

especially circumscribed by poverty so what is this distinction between the free and the slave the answer given in the Roman law and it's extremely influential is that it's the mere fact of having a master that makes you unfree the mere fact that is of living in a state of dependence on the arbitrary will of somebody else as the digest of Roman law expresses the point it's the fact of living in potestate that's to say within someone's power and hence at their Mercy that's what takes away Freedom that's what takes away your status as a Liber

homo homo of course in Latin meaning man or woman a free man or woman so here's the claim it's nothing to do with non-interference it's absence of dependence is the core idea of what it is to be free and the reason is that you will not be a Liber free man or woman but you will be a slave if there could be interference contrary to your interests and undertaken with impunity because of your dependence on the arbitrary will of somebody else there's the fundamental claim so let's inscribe it now notice that there is a continuity

here with most liberal accounts of Freedom that's to say the presence of freedom is still said to be marked by an absence but it's not absence of interference it's absence of dependence but there's also a major contrast here with the classical liberal story because it's possible on this account to be unfree even if there is no interference with the exercise of your powers and not even any threat of any such interference you could still be unfree now that claim looks absurd to some contemporary political theorist for example Matthew Kramer in his book the quality of

Freedom which by the way is the longest book review I've ever received um how Matthew says How can there be loss of Freedom when there is no interference how can that be well according to the writers I'm here talking about whom I want to call Neo Roman writers on freedom it can be the case and in two related ways first there's an epistemological point to be made if you are wholly dependent on The Good Will of someone else then you never act according to your own will which is what Freedom requires any action you perform

will always be the outcome both of your own will and of the silent permission of the person on Whose good will you depend who could with impunity have stopped you but chose not to that's always going to be there that permission so all of what look like free actions are actually permissions so you never act autonomously so there's the first claim it's the fact of dependence that takes away freedom of action you're never autonomous second point that the Neo Roman writers makes uh make stems from the consideration that it's obvious that you couldn't live subject

to the arbitrary will of someone in any domain of your life let alone if you're a chattle slave in every domain of your life but you couldn't remain for long ignorant of being in someone's power in any domain of your life without noticing it I mean you're quickly going to notice that but as soon as you notice it what's going to happen it's going to generate self sensorship it's it cannot fail to generate self-censorship and there's the second way in which your freedom is going to be undermined let me just spell that out this is

really the core claim I think I mean the first claim is very important because it's about how power is silent you could say Classical liberalism is very bad about power being silent it always wants to see the interference see the noise but some power is completely silent this is what this Trad tradtion is more sensitive to I think and the way this core claim works is that if you know that your predicament is that you are in somebody's power you never know what might happen to you you're in their power you don't know what could

happen anything could happen maybe nothing will happen or maybe nothing bad will happen but anything could happen so you're going to want to do everything in respect of the person at whose Mercy you are living to keep out of trouble so you cannot fail to self-censor systematically in the hope of keeping out of trouble you don't know what the trouble is but you have to mold yourself in such a way that you do your best to keep out of trouble summarized by tacitus in a very unpleasant epigram but you see what he's saying as he

says there is no chance for a slave he means a true slave a chattle slave not to be slavish how could you be other than slavish I mean because that's your existential predicament okay as as you have seen with the rise of what we've got on the board which I've now pushed over to the right wing which is where it all belongs um with the rise of this story that I've told you this mainly gets effaced but not entirely there's a kind of Rocky descent that we can end this lecture by looking at because we

can ask this question look I'm not talking about chattle slavery this is the the question is very precisely formulated who live as slaves in some domain of their life some domain or other in which you are in someone's power if if that's true in any domain of your life then you are living in that domain as a slave okay let's see what the answers that were given to that question were the main answer given in the 17th century the answer given by James Harrington to Bobs in the most important um English language 17th century treaties

on republicanism James Harrington's oana of 1656 was this anyone who lives as the subject of a monarch lives as a slave in certain domains of their life because all monarchs as Harrington says have prerogatives but prerogatives are ex hypothesi discretionary Powers but to the extent that a monarch has discretionary Powers there subjects depend on that Monarch's will it's arbitrary but to live in any domain of your life in the state of dependence on someone's arbitrary will is what it is to lack Freedom now the the next claim we find becomes very important with the emergence

of the empires of the Enlightenment period all who live in colonies under Imperial Powers live as slaves so that is the argument used against the British by the 13 American colonies in 1776 and it's the argument used by such Defenders of the American colonists in England as Joseph Priestley Richard Price and of course above all Thomas Payne the common core of their argument it's best known as pay's argument is that if you are governed and especially if you are taxed by a colonial power and thus have no representation in the legislative that's imposing those taxes

that's to say that in that domain of your life you are entirely dependent on The Good Will of that representative assembly for the level of Taxation that is imposed but this dependency as the colonist claim in the Declaration of 1776 serves in itself to take away freedom in that domain because they're entirely at the mercy of the English Parliament at as to what level of Taxation will be imposed and so their property is in permanent Jeopardy because they're subject to arbitrary power so that explains why the Revolutionary Declaration of 1776 was called and still is

called the Declaration of Independence Independence from what well from dependence of course in Declaration of not being dependent on the arbitrary powers that are lodged in the British constitution so notice that this country is founded on this view of what it is to be a free person now further answer comes powerfully to the for in the Revolutionary Decades of the 1790s and not before time all women who lack independent means live as slaves this is Mary wolston car central theme in the pioneering remarkable text of 1792 the Vindication of the right of women the starting

point is with the fact that most women or at least very many women are or were at the time economically dependent on men the effect I quote Wilston craft is that in order to survive such women have to learn how to become the sort of people that men like and to the extent that that is how they are obliged to form their characters they cannot act autonomously in a a number of domains of their lives these people are not free now John Stewart Mill writes the last of his major political texts in 1869 10 years

after the essay on Liberty and his TR track as I'm sure you know is called the subjection of women it's a little observed fact about John Stewart Mill that he appears as the 19th century Apostle of Classical liberalism but he changes his mind he comes over to this View and he begins the the trct on the subjection of women by saying uh that because women do not even have a testamentary will which was true in England at that time they couldn't make their own will so he's punning on will they don't they can't make their

own will so in that domain of their life they don't have a will and he says at the beginning of chapter 1 I see no difference between the position of such women and that of bond slaves so Mill the great Apostle of liberalism in his late life becomes what I'm calling a Neo Roman theorist of Liberty now how about this have they been eliminated what about this de unionized labor forces bosses who have it within their power to dismiss at will and with impunity there are certain examples of that in my country I'm sure this

is a more virtuous country than mine um we have to ask if these citizens are on this account living in that domain of their life as free men and women what about this many Democratic states certainly mine and again I'm sure America is more virtuous possess extensive powers of surveillance over their citizens that can be exercised without the consent or even the knowledge of those citizens now so far criticism has tended to focus on the exercise of those powers and it's agreed that the exercise of these Powers is an affront to privacy but that the

payoff is security and that's a quotation from President Obama but on the view of Liberty that I am now considering this is not at all the right way to analyze the costs and benefits on the Neo Roman account it's not the exercise of these Powers but the existence of these Powers which matters and is the affront and the affront is not to privacy it's an affront to Liberty both because it is arbitary we don't know what use could be made of it and because since we don't know what use could be made of it we're

very liable to start to self- censor so there's a paradigm of unfreedom on this account worrying well here I draw to a close in fact I'm a minute over 7:00 but I've got one is that all right if I because I really want this extra minute because I want to place before you the complete genealogy with all the bits and pieces taken out um that's to say all the Bold which introduced each section and there it is and with the whole thing in front of us the reason I want this final minute is to say

well what is what's the point of these remarks what is the point of genealogy I I want to make two points here in fact and the first is that genealogy in the way that I've been laying it out is always critique genealogy is critique critique of what conceptual analysis and the way that that works in the present instance is as follows we are repeatedly told in contemporary anglo-american political philosophy that there is I quote John rolls one coherent way of thinking about Liberty it is a negative concept and it consists in the absence of interference

now that is the analysis that of Freedom that underlies rs's account of justice as equal freedom but there isn't just one way of coherently analyzing the concept of freedom in our time I've spoken of writers like arent and Taylor who don't think about it in these terms at all but they think coherently and I've spoken of a legal tradition which insists that even if Liberty is seen as negative it's not to be seen in terms of interference but on the contrary of domination and dependence each of these positions and we end up with three major

features of a genealogical tree are I think coherent in their own terms my other and final point is that while each of these account is I think coherent in its own terms you can't combine them this is genealogy you can't get this to be a concept the concept of Liberty you're going to have to make some choices because they don't fit together so what choice should you make and that brings me lastly to the most important point I want to make in this lecture which is that I do not think that University teachers should go

around telling people what to think especially not in very great universities like this one you can all think you all know this this is what Vicken Stein calls assembling reminder ERS so that's what I've done I've assembled reminders for a particular purpose and that I think is the task of the teacher to try to clarify what it is that one needs to be reminded of in order to think about it and that's all I've tried to do in this lecture I've tried to present you with information relevant to answering the question how should we think

about our freedom but as to the answer well I leave that to you thank you very much yes hi nice to see you nice to see you this is just marvelous but there's there's one thing I would like to know where you would fit it deception we live in a world of ever more pervasive propaganda deception manipulation Distortion and I'm not going to comment as to whether I'm talking about our current election but just in general right and so it my will could be bent others could interfere with my action by bending my will I

think through deception rather than through a threat uh or any of the categories under threat or does it fit under self-realization as a distortion of of our political essence like if we are told there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so we must go to war etc etc uh and um or something like that or does it go up there does it go down there how so it's very important and and it's the only thing I could think of yeah that didn't fit the taxonomy the taxonomy is marvelous that's thank you Jim that that's

that's wonderful uh and I'm inclined simply to to add it under other possibilities because um of course a manipulation is interference um and much has been written about this uh but it's a particular kind of interference because it's one to which you you you might give Ascent without reading it as interference so very high pressure advertising is the standard case that would be given you don't read that as interference but you are mistaken in supposing that your choice Was Not Bent I think it's ever more pervasive than should yeah it deserves mention yeah well thank

you no I I'm I'm I'm absolutely absolutely I hope the questions won't be as distructive as this all the time but yeah no I'm I'm very willing to accommodate that it's a very special kind of a case because you you have the illusion of Freedom yes yes exactly yeah I thought of another possibility again I'm not sure where it belongs ignorance that would be the classic 18th century uh possibility that would interfere with uh yeah uh with freedom but a more general question no say a bit more about that well that the the argument would

be one cannot be free unless one can understand the possibilities for Action sure and where people are kept in ignorance yes then then this is a form of Oppression yes um and so you know that would be again it could be another possibility under s yes I'm inclined to think that that's going to run no interference by external agencies acting upon the will by coercion yes but one could keep oneself in ignorance too oh sure but then in that case that comes out as under the self doing it yeah yeah I think it copes with

that yes another question the impossibility of having a CO a coherent yes view um this is a kind of roran question do we need a coherent view or do we need uh a set of arguments that will work at some points in some cases and a set of arguments that will work in other cases well this is a very ran lecture and I'm very grateful to have that great name cited here because what I understand um dick Roy to be wanting to say most clearly I think in the first chapter of contingency ir and solidarity

is that these are all just vocabularies and the question that we should be asking ourselves is maybe about all these normative Concepts is you know they're meant to be working for us which one is going to go deeply into our society and do the most for us which is the one that is really going to um satisfy our sense that that these are are the problems that it's solving so it's a very there may not be just one well in any society no of course that's right and you could change your mind I mean it's

very striking that um this country was set up uh over here with that view but it sort of ended up somewhere over here hasn't it in speaking generally uh sure but what what I'm saying is that in saying that sure you want a vocabulary you want it to be working for us in the way that will answer our questions and be useful to us our concepts are what we bring to the world in order to make sense of that world and we want the concept to make sense of our world that will change but what

I meant to say was the idea that we can from all of this say yeah but what is freedom really what is really Freedom really that's the mistake but that's the mistake that analytical philosophy as I was able to quote a very great exponent of it quite explicitly making there is no way in which you can put all of these together into a story there's no way to get a narrative out of it ex hypothesi yeah I have a question over here hi yeah hi um I wanted to ask you actually I think that your

final remarks about dependence are going to hold the answer to my question but I'm not sure exactly how so I want to ask you anyway my question is it seems to me like there's more to the marxian part of the genealogy um than false consciousness that is it's not just that you're not free if you are subject to a false consciousness and you subscribe to a Bourgeois view of the good life but there's also um a sort of further point which is that you know you can't maybe that comes out of the marxian moment of

the genealogy which is that you can't be free in a in a state of poverty you know maybe there's sort of a Social Democratic view of Freedom According to which unless you have basic means of subsistence and maybe even access to a good education and Healthcare unless your government gives you those things you you you can't really be free um and so I'm wondering you know so does that can can I think that your remarks about dependence can solve that problem but I'm wondering how I like the way that you've linked this to the Marxist

tradition because it's a striking feature of Marx's writings in particular that he uses the vocabulary of slavery all the time the wage slave the dictatorship of the proar I mean he's talking in classical terms here and this is essentially a classical Theory so that um yes I I think it would it would come up with some um undemocratic survivals as I've called them uh or it would come up here so that the figure of the wage slave is a person who only has their labor to offer in a market that's all they have to offer

and they're offering it to a boss who can dismiss them at will and with impunity so they're they're a slave in that context but that to so they're unfree they are unfree but they're unfree on this analysis of unfreedom there would be a very interesting piece of intellectual history to be written about the relationship of the emergence of socialist thinking in the 19th century from this story because socialism is the extension of this story in in 19 century social philosophy yeah thank you oh gosh I I yes thank you um so there was something that

you said in passing that really struck me and I just want to preface that with a personal story so my ancestors came from be the colonized when I came here uh and became a citizen I was very struck by the notion of Liberty in places other than America and the defense of Liberty which was sort of instead of the pursuit of Liberty it was really the defense of Liberty that was very strongly emphasized here so I'd love to hear your take on how it devolved from the liberty of a citizen to the liberty of a

state that maintains citizens as unfree yes very interesting right because it's an immediate implication of this way of thinking that you can only be free in a democracy I mean Classical liberalism is not interested in the relationship of Liberty to forms of government because if you say freedom is not interference then what you're interested in is not the sources of political power but the extent of it so I could live under a dictatorship which if I was a privileged person might leave me pretty much completely free uh I mean obviously there are oligarchs in in

Russia who live like that that they're completely free on on that analysis but um that's not the analysis that's being given here this analysis says you're not free unless there is equal Freedom that to say everyone in the society has been relieved from conditions of dependence on arbitrary and dominating Powers so anyone who so that has to be the aspiration of a Democratic Society because what you end up with then is equal Freedom no one is subject to the domination of a power that is arbitrary that's to say can act contrary to their interests with

impunity doesn't have to track their interests now um if that is true of everyone you not only have equal Freedom you have social justice so that that would be the analysis that would be given here so the state um is thought to be irrelevant really to freedom in the classical liberal tradition and that's how we come to turn Classical liberalism into libertarianism it's continually moving in that direction is to think well look freedom is a very great value of ours but what it is to lose your freedom is to be interfered with who interferes with

you well the state the law is an act of interference it's an obvious Act of external interference operating by coercion so less law more freedom that's a recognizable story in this country in particular and there's a continual tendency for liberalism to become libertarianism in that way but if you think um well that's not the right way to be thinking about Freedom the right way to be thinking about freedom is everyone for it to be a free society would have to be relieved from conditions that left them at the mercy of arbitrary power so the people

would have to be the rulers there's no alternative but that the people are the rulers because that's the only way in which there's not going to be arbitary power yeah thank you um thank you so much for your talk this is a little bit of a follow this is a follow-up question a little bit from the woman who asked a question two questions ago um so I'm fascinated by this idea of um um uh debates about wage slavery and our dependence on Market forces as you know coming out of the marxian tradition um I see

sort of uh on the other hand this um really kind of powerful piece of political rhetoric at least in the United States uh about the dangers of the welfare state being precisely the dangers of cultivating among um the lower classes um a culture of dependency right this is a term that we hear all the time so I I would I would be curious to hear from you to what extent you think that contemporary debates about Freedom or Liberty at least in the context of democratic societies as being fundamentally a debate between those who think that

the greatest danger is dependency on this uh arbitrary capitalist system and those who think that the greatest danger is dependency on the state yes good well the the dependency that I'm talking about this is extremely important to me um is very specific it is dependency Upon A A dominating power is status relationship of domination and dependence which takes away Freedom so the power that generates the dependence that takes away freedom is an arbitrary power where arbitary is given the reading that a power is arbitrary if there is someone who can operate it with impunity without

tracking your interests they don't have to track your interests they might but they don't have to and if they don't that's done with impunity that's what's arbitrary that produces in that domain dependence so that's to talk about dependence in a completely different way from people who say well people get dependent on welfare that's not to be dependent on an arbitrary power that doesn't take away their freedom on this analysis at all because what we're talking about is being dependent on a power which is in which in respect of which you are at its mercy so

it's very unfortunate that this story has got all tangled up with talk about welfare dependence welfare dependence is dependence on the state um the there may be arguments in favor of that being an innocent form of dependence morally speaking or there may be arguments of a moralizing kind that that as it were moralizes poverty poverty is your fault something like that in which case a very strong moral argument would be set up that is completely separate from what I've talked about this evening it's no part of what I've talked about and it's very important to

keep those separate I think yeah very glad of the question by the way because I didn't clarify that except in so far as I was careful to say what arbitrariness is I'm only talking about arbitrariness and by the way I'm also only talking about domains you could be a Liber homo a free man or woman in many domains of your life but there could be a domain of your life in which you are at somebody's Mercy um if if that's true of the whole of your life you're a chattle slave and we're not talking about

that but if it's true in any domain of your life then you're not a Liber homo yes yeah I'm I'm actually out of control here I'm going to hand over to to uh Superior Authority and and all right hands hands up I want to make sure yes yes thank you are we still recording yeah so have I been moving around too much don't turn that light on again what you I want you comfortable right he doesn't mean [Laughter] that thank you that was that was brilliant and I really liked your tie um I just wanted

oh my daughter gave it to me yeah it's good isn't it it's amazing yeah it it gets brighter yeah I'm glad I sat up the front um I had a quick and easy question I noticed you took great care in your lecture to specify you're talking about English language genealogy gen genealogies and I just wanted to know uh if sort of the new field of global intellectual history played a role in the excavation of this genealogy and how many new trees you might imagine for non-english language uh sources well thank you wonderful question I mean

I did say at the outset that that this decision to speak about the Anglo American liberal tradition was arbitrary I mean it it's completely arbitrary but it is our tradition isn't it I mean this is what's formed our identities and so that was my excuse um it's important fact about my genealogy that no proper names appear on it do they it's a kind of Christmas tree and you can hang any number of names I've mentioned a great number of names but it is important to me that there are no names there so if you could

um bring to bear an understanding of different traditions of thinking about freedom I think they would be Western Traditions actually but there would not be English and anglish traditions um I would hope that you would find them somewhere on here I mean I do have Ambitions for this diagram it's taken me a long time to work it out and um one of the Ambitions is that that you you can treat it as a Christmas tree so if you were to say to me well where is Russo I would be able to point him out to

you um I mean he he's here obviously sorry with nonwestern yes well I just don't know what to say um yeah it would be interesting to give this lecture in China for example is what you're saying and would they think well I we don't map it like this at all I could imagine that that's right this is working for um for Western for sort of Latin based languages isn't it that's all I would claim for it it's it's um no I mean it wouldn't have to be purely Latin based because presumably you can do all

this in Finland as well but um I haven't tried um but it it's this isn't this is a European and American story but I just want to say that's not Global but Europe and America are important in the modern world and this is what shaped our identity so I'm being a bit defensive here because obviously what you say is right but I don't know how to carry that forward I I could however insert other European thinkers onto this with great ease and we've talked a bit about Marx we've talked a bit about Hegel we we

could we we certainly uh add Russo we could go on like that M we've had the front thank you I have a difficulty with that self versus external agencies uh difference that you have because because I see passion as as a response to an external motivator and inauthenticity is a response to again another external motivator the social norms Etc so how are those external forces different than those of external agencies that that you've separated them out yeah good they're not seen as um invading forces they're seen rightly or wrongly as motivations so what we inquiring

into here is the source of the motivations I haven't gone into that but obviously um in some cases the source of these motivations will carry Us in the direction that we were talking about here but I think the distinction is a fairly clear one I know that's rather what you're contesting but the the the way that the distinction would have to run is that sure you could say that there is a distinction these These are also Intruders that's what you're saying these are also Intruders right yeah they're not perceived as Intruders well I kind of

see that if you're out there by yourself without anybody else you're not going to have any anger or hatred or right or or you're not going to have any social norms yes sorry to force you into an action so so it necessarily is uh interpersonal at that point which which is what you said external agenes yes well that's what the tradition I was talking about would want to contest I mean they would want to make a very strong distinction between forms of motivation which are open to you and that's the force in the rationalist tradition

of which I gave the example of Lo in which Freedom gets to be connected up with reason that it's only the rational person who is free that's what they want to say but that's not because the person who's not rational is subject to an external Force he he or she could be but then that's easily accommodating uh what LO wants to say uh and it's quite standard move in in rationalist philosophy is to say um the will I mean it's a geography of the will where the will can Ally itself with reason that produces Freedom

if it allies itself and allows itself to be overcome by Passion and notice that a slave to Passion huh um then that is not an externality but it doesn't lead to Freedom it leads to what they call license and this distinction between Liberty and license is absolutely fundamental for the it takes Hobs and subsequently Hume to say what's gone completely wrong here which is rather up your street is there's no motivation which isn't passion I mean what is this distinction between reason and the passions reason is and ought only to be the slave of the

passions as hum says making an excellent joke about you know slavery and and freedom um so that's the radical move is to say we've got the the moral psychology wrong here um the philosophical psychology wrong here that a passion is all that can motivate but as long as you're in the rationalist tradition you'll want to say no no that can be conquered passion can always be conquered and reason is the Conqueror of passion and that's autonomy so it's simply an analysis of autonomy yeah so we can take one more question um I know why you

feel overwhelmed the thank you thank you I'm very glad to be the last person to ask my question so it's been fascinating um so in the tradition that's on the left um Liberty is denied if there is a possibility of arbitrary interference yes exactly but as we go through examples they're all arbitrary but they're not all equally in interference and um the questions that followed also emphasize the arbitrary portion and not the interference prawn of that of that balance and do you think that this tradition in modernity overemphasizes arbitrariness and underemphasizes interference yeah very good

point I mean Ian inclined to put the question the other way around and to say um doesn't the liberal tradition underestimate the significance of Silent Power by saying look there's got to be some visible interference or there got to be some structure of the psyche which is what we've been talking about or there's got to be some Intruder um what this wants to say and this is what's extremely important here is that it's the fact of dependence that takes away freedom of action that doesn't there doesn't have to be even any threat of interference but

it's just the the interpersonal knowledge that this could be happening it's all counterfactual but the claim is first of all that takes away autonomy because everything that looks like a free action is actually a permission so there's that epistemological point to be made but the second point is self-censorship and that's really Central nothing has happened right and those are not this is not the question what my question is is some of the actions of the boss some of the actions of the boss arguably are not interference right if somebody does not give you a job

that's arguably not interference right even though it's arbitrary yes so so this is the angle from which I'm looking at it yes well look the person who doesn't give you a job I mean they would not be very concerned about that they would be concerned with the conditions of your labor if you're in a job so that for example if you're in a job in which you can be fired without um appeal and with impunity they would think it certain that you would become self-censoring and self-censorship is the undermining of autonomy on this analysis so

you have no chance of autonomy you're a wage slave I mean that's that was what you were talking about and that's the force of the of the the Republican and of course also the Socialist analysis which insists on bringing back the vocabulary of Slavery to talk about the conditions of people under industrial capitalism yeah well I'm willing to take one more no I mean apart from Jim Fishin nobody actually pulled the plug out yet but they we have one more over here yes I've got to get back here thank you my question is about um

the arbitrariness um in this um chart that we see here on the left um under contemporary examples of arbitrary power you you talk about undemocratic survivals but you also talk about dependence on the arbit arbitary power of States more generally and the example that you were using there was the power of surveillance of the modern State both here in the United States in the United Kingdom and in other European countries those are all democracies that impose these types of laws on their citizens so I was wondering um how you would reconcile that with um the

element of arbitrariness and is there maybe a an additional definition that we need that goes beyond just the fact that something is based on a democratic decision of a majority to limit state power within that within that um framework people who are worried about powers of surveillance are worried about the extent to which these the use of these Powers is unknown so this um information is being collected and you could say that by representation that's been done by consent but the question of what can be done with this um is indeterminate in so far as

we don't know I mean going back to what we were just saying um in so far as we don't know uh and we're continually reassured I mean in the British Parliament the Prime Minister said you don't have to worry as long as you've done nothing wrong um which didn't work very well because for example he was going to say what it was to have done something wrong and so the implication was that um well these powers are there and we don't know what could be done with these Powers now I have friends who work on

some sensitive questions about climate change in one of the English universities they've all given up email not because they know what's going to happen if they use email but because they don't know what's going to happen What use could be made of it they don't know maybe nothing maybe it's not important but notice what they're doing there self censoring it would be much easier to use email so that's the thing that these people are worrying about rightly or wrongly I'm not here to say I'm a genealogist I'm not a moralist well please join me in

thanking thank you very thank you thank you very much you this program is brought to you by the Stanford Humanity Center for more information please visit us at hc. stanford.edu